Opinions, enthusiasms, staircase wit.

December 1, 2015

the new plutocracy

Here's a
nice long read from yesterday that you should have read,
or at least skimmed the first/last paragraphs so you can pretend
that you have read, concerning how the state of Illinois was
bought and paid for. I know, I'm a silly progressive and always
exaggerating to make a point and
probably a violent criminal, but no, this case could not
be more clear if someone found a check written for a couple
hundred million dollars with "Buying State of Illinois" in
the memo line:

...[Billionaire Kenneth C.] Griffin and a small group of
rich supporters -- not
just from Chicago, but also from New York City
and Los Angeles, southern Florida and Texas -- have poured
tens of millions of dollars into the state, a concentration
of political money without precedent in Illinois history.

Their wealth has forcefully shifted the state's balance of power.
Last year, the families helped elect as governor Bruce Rauner,
a Griffin friend and former private equity executive from
the Chicago suburbs, who estimates his own fortune at more
than $500 million. Now they are rallying behind Mr. Rauner's
agenda: to cut spending and overhaul the state's pension
system, impose term limits and weaken public employee unions.

This actually got a little play out there in the world
(and it's a world crowded with takes that border on atrocity
these days), but there's an aspect of this that is a little
discrete that I want to emphasize. There's a shorthand that
these billionaires that are buying up governments are "conservative
Republicans," and that is not entirely the case. These Gilded
Age Patriarchs are most certainly conservative, in the Nelson
Rockefeller sense, but they are not necessary long-time,
Chamber-of-Commerce Republicans:

Most of them lean Republican; some are Democrats. But to a
remarkable degree, their philosophies
are becoming part of a widely adopted blueprint for
public officials around the country: Critical of the power
of unions, many are also determined to reduce spending and
taxation, and are skeptical of government-led efforts to
mitigate the growing gap between the rich and everyone else.

They're not poli-sci ideologues as much as they are
greedy one-percenters who don't believe in the function of
government. They bitch about their taxes, they think of
employee-negotiated pensions as some unfunded obligation on
the backs of taxpayers, they don't think that workers should
be protected, etc. They're robber barons, and they're no more
beholden to the Republican Party (or whatever will be left of
it after Donald Trump is done with it) than they are beholden
to Santa Claus.

The piece is worth a read.

And ancillary to all of this is the very interesting sidebar of
whether we live in a plutocracy or an oligarchy, and as it
is interesting and a binary choice, let's step on the neck of
this sidebar before it metastasizes into yet another facile
disagreement ripping social media in twain. The unseen hands
that control the government are both few and wealthy; either
term will do, as long as your intent is to demonstrate how
basically powerless everyone in this representative democracy is
these days.